Back in the ’50s, there was a fuss over a brainwashing technique known as subliminal communication. A movie theater found that if its films included tiny blips of commercials for popcorn and soda —moving past so quickly that the viewer did not consciously realize he was seeing them—popcorn and soda sales went up. These results were highly uncertain, though, and the technique was abandoned. Since 1957 it has been against FCC policy to permit subliminal techniques on television.

I should never have let John write the first chapter because he always has to twist things subliminally.

Paul Zindel -- The Pigman

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Go said we must be mutually subliminally forgetting to mail those checks, that what we really wanted to forget was our dad.

Gillian Flynn -- Gone Girl

Years passed and I became a part of the Randel family and subliminally tried to become a substitute for the lost Randy.

Pat Conroy -- The Water is Wide

They won’t buy a television, like everyone else, because my father says it turns you into a cretin and emits harmful radiation and subliminal messages as well.

Margaret Atwood -- Cat’s Eye

Bollywood pop—turned down to a low, almost subliminal whine—spiraled and sparkled hypnotically, just at the threshold of my hearing.

Donna Tartt -- The Goldfinch

In moments of great stress, every life form that exists gives out a tiny subliminal signal.

Douglas Adams -- The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy

Some of it was slipping through, flooding his brain with sinister subliminal images.

Stephen King -- The Shining

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Drew was glaring at Diana Leven, subliminally begging to be dragged off the witness stand, Alex assumed.

Jodi Picoult -- Nineteen Minutes

It’s not that smiles and nods are subliminal messages.

Malcolm Gladwell -- The Tipping Point

It was like a lecture strip in a subliminal training projector at the Bene Gesserit school …. but faster …. blindingly faster.

Frank Herbert -- Dune

We are dogs, she and I, sniffing for clues, our throats quivering with subliminal growls.

Joy Kogawa -- Obasan

I lay there, having drowned in West, my body having drifted down to lie there in the comforting, subliminal ooze on the sea floor of History.

Robert Penn Warren -- All the King’s Men

An eerie static, insistent but near subliminal, that made me think of wintering souls, some form of dormant life approaching the threshold of perception.

Don DeLillo -- White Noise

Mathematical solutions are selected by the subliminal self on the basis of "mathematical beauty," of the harmony of numbers and forms, of geometric elegance.

Robert M. Pirsig -- Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance

He had descended consciously (awake) into the kingdom of the unconscious (deep sleep) and had incorporated the values of the subliminal experience into his waking personality.

Joseph Campbell -- The Hero With a Thousand Faces

Man’s subliminal urge to destroy what he could neither subdue nor deify.

Arundhati Roy -- The God of Small Things

Maybe the letter was a subliminal open line to my brothers.

Dave Peizer -- A Man Named Dave

It’s nearly subliminal, dig?

Don DeLillo -- Underworld

It was like a dream, like something in some subliminal fantasy, or a scene that had come straight from the imagination.

Nora Roberts -- Summer Pleasures

Acting with almost subliminal caution, he drove past the house without slowing and parked around the comer on a side street about a quarter of a mile away.

Stephen King -- Cujo

Eckels stood smelling of the air, and there was a thing to the air, a chemical taint so subtle, so slight, that only a faint cry of his subliminal senses warned him it was there.

Ray Bradbury -- A Sound of Thunder

"No surprises" is the motto of the franchise ghetto, its Good Housekeeping seal, subliminally blazoned on every sign and logo that make up the curves and grids of light that outline the Basin.

Neal Stephenson -- Snow Crash

It had been seeping in, in its subliminal, unidentifiable way since they’d entered the place, all strings, reeds, muted brass.

Thomas Pynchon -- The Crying of Lot 49

"If, as you suggest," I began, "they constantly express and interpret themselves and their universe by a kind of subliminal dreamsong, it would seem to follow that, as in all things, some are better at it than others.

Roger Zelazny -- My Name is Legion

Now that he mentioned it, I was aware of muffled music emanating from the rear of the apartment, a deep, subliminal thump.

Donna Tartt -- The Goldfinch

The skin is off the hand—we see it immediately, something very wrong—but by reversing the thumb he makes it look even more wrong, it registers subliminally even if we can’t put our finger on it, something really out of order, not right.

Donna Tartt -- The Goldfinch

I mean, she thinks she can get away with her subliminal twists by calling them omens, but she doesn’t fool me.

Paul Zindel -- The Pigman

And I picked up on Patsy’s subliminal message of brushing off whatever problems came her way.

Dave Peizer -- A Man Named Dave

Exhausted sleep, spine to spine, in dirty sheets that smelled of cigarette ash and dog, Popchik belly-up and snoring, subliminal whispers in the air blowing from the wall vents if you listened hard enough.

Donna Tartt -- The Goldfinch

He put the gun down,’ the psychiatrist said, ’because even on a subliminal level, he understood that otherwise, he was going to be shot.

Jodi Picoult -- Nineteen Minutes

Then, by accident (Dr. Hilarius, if asked, would accuse her of using subliminal cues in the environment to guide her to a particular person) or howsoever, she came on one Stanley Koteks, who wore wire-rim bifocals, sandals, argyle socks, and at first glance seemed too young to be working here.

Thomas Pynchon -- The Crying of Lot 49

It was indeed the only one of the many structures that betrayed any sign of activity about it, though this was more a subliminal impression than anything one could put one’s finger on.

Douglas Adams -- The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy

The subliminal self, Poincaré said, looks at a large number of solutions to a problem, but only the interesting ones break into the domain of consciousness.

Robert M. Pirsig -- Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance

As Poincaré pointed out, there must be a subliminal choice of what facts we observe.

Robert M. Pirsig -- Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance

Poincaré then hypothesized that this selection is made by what he called the "subliminal self," an entity that corresponds exactly with what Phaedrus called preintellectual awareness.

Robert M. Pirsig -- Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance

Associated with your questions will be a subliminal Quality discrimination identical to the Quality discrimination that led Poincaré to the Fuchsian equations.